September 3, 1956

The Floating Opera

By ORVILLE PRESCOTT

THE FLOATING OPERA
By John Barth.

n the morning of June 23, 1937 (or maybe it was June 24, he couldn't remember exactly), Todd Andrews, the best lawyer on the Eastern Shore of Maryland and the most determinedly eccentric citizen of the tidewater city of Cambridge, decided to commit suicide. Todd was 37 years old, a bachelor and a resident of the Dorset Hotel. Each morning Todd paid his rent for the night before by check, $1.50, and then registered for another night. It wasn't that his endocarditis or his damaged prostate gland made Todd doubtful that he would live out the day, although he was doubtful. It was his pleasure in doing everything differently. Seventeen years later, in 1954, Todd sat down to write an account of that memorable day and why he did not kill himself after all. He had seven peach baskets full of notes on the subject. The book he produced, "The Floating Opera," a first novel by John Barth, is now published.

John Barth comes from Cambridge, Md., himself. He is young, erudite and clever. Every now and then in "The Floating Opera" he is funny. His ability to contrive a really preposterous situation is impressive. His gift of gab is impressive, too.

Faults Outweigh Humor

Nevertheless, "The Floating Opera" isn't anywhere near funny enough to make up for its grievous faults. Most of this odd novel is dull. Most of its humor is labored and flat. Some of its heavy-handed attempts to shock seem cheap in a juvenile and nasty way rather than sophisticated or realistic, as they probably were intended.

Todd Andrews describing his own life from childhood through his great suicide failure twists and turns through so many flashbacks, pauses to consider so many irrelevancies and spouts so much pretentious verbiage that "The Floating Opera" seems permanently grounded on a mud bank. When Todd describes his "magnificent" mistress, the wife of his best friend, and the menage a trois, the three of them kept up for years, he only arouses virulent disbelief and does not make up for it by comedy. It takes a Noel coward to make the most of such a situation.

When Todd describes his professional shenanigans in several prolonged and wonderfully complicated lawsuits he displays his own attitude toward the practice of law, but he fails completely to amuse, Todd thought of the law as a game he enjoyed playing. He was not concerned about legal ethics or even very seriously about his clients.

And the reason Todd took nothing seriously and believed in nothing was that he was an amateur existentialist, although, of course, he had never heard of existentialism. "I insist upon my basic and ultimate irresponsibility," said Todd. Nothing has any intrinsic value, he argued, neither material things like money or success, nor abstractions like love or truth. "The reasons that people have for attributing value to things are always ultimately arbitrary. "Men and women are only animals" and "everything we do on earth is absolutely ridiculous."

A Philosophical Disquisition

Todd's ideas on the uselessness and meaninglessness of life are developed at great length in "The Floating Opera" with consequent tedium. It was his negative philosophy that made Todd decide to commit suicide. And that decision is as ridiculous as everything else in this strange book, for Todd's enjoyment of life was enormous. It is impossible to believe that anyone who took such relish in his own sense of humor, in Maryland rye and in lovemaking would consider suicide for a moment.

It is difficult to know just how seriously Mr. Barth expects his readers to take the ideas in a story that, after all, is basically a frenzied farce. But they are developed at such length that I suspect that Mr. Barth sets much store by them. This conclusion is reinforced by the fact that the true climax of "The Floating Opera" is philosophical. Todd Andrews discovers everything is not ridiculous, that his love for a little child is real and important. All values, Todd still thinks, may be relative. But nevertheless, "There are relative values. These, at least, we have, and if they are all we have then in no way whatsoever are they inferior."

Such a denouement is hardly earth-shaking. It is reasonable and intelligent as far as it goes. Whether it was a good idea to emphasize philosophizing so prominently in a novel as filled with ludicrous antics and jubilant sexuality as "The Floating Opera" is doubtful. It is almost as if two authors at work on two books had decided to collaborate. One author writes crude farce occasionally brightened by wit. The other broods on the meaning of existence with solemn goodwill. The result is odd indeed.